Photo Editor Paige Nelson
According to the SDSU website it is a “diverse student, faculty and community initiative promoting dialogue and understanding about conflict zones through experiential education.”
Fellowships, fundraisers and $580 from Associated Students funded the trip. Those selected were able to raise more than 80 percent of the trip’s total cost, which amounts to about $16,000.
The students will stop in Washington, D.C., where they will meet with experts from the U.S. Department of State’s Middle East Partnership Initiative and the U.S. Institute of Peace before flying abroad.
They will then spend approximately two weeks learning about Palestinian and Israeli culture by dining withfamilies and residents, communicating with officials and community members and delving into the entertainment and nightlife.
“We’re prepared to be humbled,” SDSU OTI President Lori Carrillo said.
Carrillo, a political science graduate student at SDSU, spent months preparing for the trip. She and fellow OTI members studied the various cultural, religious and political nuances of the area and consulted with other members who visited the region several times.
However, the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be fully understood unless multifaceted perspectives are considered through travel, says OTI public relations representative Sandy Chavez. Chavez, a political science junior who also traveled the area, says her goal is to form a developed opinion of the conflict based on education, knowledge and immersion.
“In order to form an opinion, we need to be informed,” Chavez said.
With such knowledge, she hopes to find a peaceful solution she can share with students and the community.
In every generation there have been those who have been provided with the gifts of intellect, a thirst for knowledge, an appreciation for the aesthetic in life, an internal sense of morality, love and generosity, an ability to be self-critical, an ability to ask the difficult questions and the wisdom to know that life has very few absolutes.
These are the very attributes that give us our humanity, our nobility, perhaps even our soul and have allowed us to escape the dark caves and ignorance of our ancestors.
However, there have always been those who seek anarchy, who must impose their twisted perception of reality on everyone else. These groups demand undeserved allegiance or subservience and view any form of non-compliance or progress as an insult to their very existence. These groups seek allegiance at the point of a sword and respond to any criticism in the most violent and hateful of ways while avoiding truth as if it were a disease.
These groups preach intolerance and enslavement and idolize ignorance, death and destruction above all else. These groups look for simple answers to complex questions without the mental ability to deal with either.
Millions upon millions of souls have been lost over the generations to satisfy the needs of these fools. These are the groups who are the first to claim victimhood, who demand retribution, who seek power yet who would enslave all others to their will. These are the groups that have contributed nothing to mankind except death and destruction, terror, intolerance and hatred.
Nazism, Fascism, Communism are all reflections of the very essence of this condition but they are all mere amateurs compared to the greatest perpetrator of all, the ideology of islam.
Over its 1400 year history islam has incorporated this intolerance and hatred into the very essence of its existence and has made ignorance and killing an art form.
islam glorifies the writings of a 7th century illiterate who by any standard of today would be locked away as a degenerate, incorrigible murdering pedophile. islam binds its followers to blind unquestioning and illogical thought control and raises its children in the hatred, lies and deceptions of its twisted morality.
This ideology eliminates self determination and the nobility of mankind and treats the female portion of its population as nothing more than subservient vaginas. It preaches hatred of other religions and beliefs and considers it is superior to all others, a so called master “race”.
islam gave us 911, the bombings in Moscow, Bali, Paris, London, Madrid, Nigeria and Kenya, the Cole, the Belsan School massacre, the underwear bomber, the insult of the proposed 911 mosque, the recent genocide of Christians and Jews not to mention more than 18,000 other identifiable terrorist attacks since 911. It gave us airport strip searches and rape gangs, subversive mosque operations, the death of film maker Theo van Gogh and reporters such as Daniel Pearl. It glorified decapitation as negotiation tool and it honoured child rape in order to emulate the teachings of its fearless leader mighty muhammad.
No muslim country on this planet provides anything of value to the remainder of the world other than the oil which lies beneath its feet and which required the west’s expertise to extract. This oil has generated trillions of dollars (every dime unearned) which has been used for the most shameful of purposes to promote this mad and ignorant agenda or for the most extravagant of lifestyles while others of its people are mired in poverty.
To claim that the “culture” of the islamic middle east has anything, ANYTHING to offer us in the west is to drink the cool aid of Taqquiya.
islam is not the moral equivalent of our western secular democracy and islam is not prepared to co-exist with Western culture. islam will never be anything more than the ramblings of ignorance and unbridled stupidity – wrapped in testosterone induced creed of hatred, envy, violence and death.
The West must not let the lunatics run the asylum – the left’s suicidal allegiance to this ideology defies logic or common sense..
Do not even try to argue the position that acceptance of the massive and global islamic intolerance including the incredible and ongoing atrocities by muslims against Christians and Jews, is some form of liberal “enlightenment” It is nothing of the sort. Those who hold the left wing values and espouse tolerance are mistaken this is not a situation where all you need is love. You cannot love an ideology that wants to destroy you.
All men of good will must make this issue an international priority must stand up and tell the muslim world that they are wrong, must not let this ignorance spread like the cancer it is to the rest of mankind. The sooner we all treat islam with the contempt it so richly deserves, the greater the benefit to all mankind.
All men of good will must spread the truth and face this monster head on with a full understanding of the cost of failure.